Bass Lessons!
Hey friends,
We have been working on both guitar and BASS in class recently, so I’m sharing some Bass references here.
We learned the 4 strings on a bass: E A D G (same as the lowest 4 strings on a guitar).
When we’re playing bass the most important things are:
-To play on the BOOM part of every Boom-chuck. We could also thing of that as the down-beat. We play every time we’re counting a number (1, 2, 3, 4).
-To play the root of the chord- so if guitars play a D chord, we play a D.
In addition to those important things, we learned to alternate between the Root of the chord, and the 5th of the chord. (Ex. when the guitar plays a D chord, we alternate D-A-D-A, or when the guitar plays a G chord, we alternate G-D-G-D).
This stuff works great in 4/4 time, but we also learned to play bass in waltz time. (Remember when we learned how to waltz in class??)
In waltz time, we play on the 1 of every measure. (Ex. 1!-2-3, 1!-2-3). We can still alternate between the Root and the 5th of the chord, but it’s kind of in slow motion.
If we want to get fancy, we can also play on the 3. (Ex. 1!-2-3!)
So all together, the waltz variations we practiced were:
Roots only on the 1.
Roots and 5ths on the 1.
Roots only on 1 and 3.
Roots and 5ths on 1 and 3.
Our main favorites for practicing bass were Sugar Hill and Angelina Baker (in 4/4) and Amazing Grace (in 3/4 or Waltz time). We should have sheets for the chords to those songs, which we can use in our bass practice.